This is the first time that Whiskey & Fox has appeared electronically before appearing in some physical place, no matter how small the locale, in print. Parks & Occupation No. 2 was going to be more or less ready to go out for Wednesday, 18 Nov. 2011: to be delivered first in print form to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan and only then made available for free download. However, in the wake of the (military-ish) Police raid and eviction of the Zuccotti Park Occupation very early in the Tuesday am, a visit to Zuccotti Park no longer turns up a space into which books, periodicals, or other printed matter can be deposited for public use. Police would not even allow admission to the park with thick stack of printed matter in hand. While, certainly, the journal could place printed copies any number of places in NYC and elsewhere other than Zuccotti Park, in order to mark--even in some small way--this current seizure/attempt to destroy the people's library and the free-zine distribution center [which also offered a number of excellent anarchist primers on peaceful resistance, the currently-legal rights of demonstrators, and Modified-Consensus Democratic procedures], as well as the Occupation itself, Whiskey & Fox is putting this issue online before producing any print copies.

3.

Parks & Occupation No. 3 is currently in production, and will be out soon.

Foley Square, 18 Nov. 2011

Posted by
Whiskey & Fox

10/24/11

The first issue of Whiskey & Fox Vol. 5 Special Series, Parks & Occupation is out. They can be picked up at the Free Zine Station at Zuccotti Park in NY; OR you can download the PDF right here or under the issue archive tab:

Contributors include: Robin Clarke, David Hadbawnik, Michael Farrell, Jeff T. Johnson, Sten Carlson, & Rebecca Mertz. This is set of really incredible poems. As Spicer writes: "Reading the poem that does not appear when the magician starts or when the magician finishes. A climbing in-between. Real."

2.

The Parks & Occupation series will continue for at least a couple more tiny-format issues, and while we have some good material already, we will consider more submissions. So please, consider sending work in accordance with the call for work. We will make an announcement if we can no longer accept any submissions.

Make haste! Decorate the new democracy!

Posted by
Whiskey & Fox

10/18/11

First, production of the next full issue (this one titled ‘Lithic’) has not been abandoned. Production has been slow
or on hold, but by no means stopped.

In the meantime, Whiskey & Fox is going to take up the torch of its
earlier hasty mode of production, making haste on a series of very short issues
in a special series dispatched specifically for the various radical occupations
currently underway. What is meant by “for the occupations” is not “in tribute
to,” perhaps not even “in solidarity with,” but as a foxing of theory and
poetry/poetics into the occupations/as part of the occupations. See the
specific call for work below.

A series of very
short (4-6 pages) issues will go out over the next couple months. They will of course be made available as PDF downloads, as well as by distribution of
hard-copies to as many of the now growing libraries of the occupations as
Whiskey & Fox can coordinate (of increasing importance as a research
resource and a source of intellectual energy as the occupiers evolve their
horizontal governing structures, planning and theorizing for the future).
Distribution to the Occupation of Zucotti park in NYC is already coordinated.
If there is an occupation or any particular hub of related activity to which
you would like to help distribute hard copies, please contact the editors at
editors [at] whiskeyandfox [dot] org.

So, now, Whiskey
& Fox issues its own call to intellectual labor, hoping to provoke the kind
of “short raids on the chicken ‘coup’ and snacks on the state” which
constituted the early issues: pointed and productive paragraph-long essays, poems, images, etc.

Parks & Occupation: a call for workVol. 5, Special series (dedicated to Denise Levertov & Robert Duncan)

Writing as the Office for Soft Architecture, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson asks, “what shall our new ornaments be? How shall we adorn mortality now?”—insisting that “this is a serious political question.” Whiskey & Fox wishes to provisionally believe this and calls for work that will function to ornamentally elaborate the current occupations of parks, squares, etc.An editorial in the second issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal states, “For Wall Street and Washington, the demand is not on them to give us something that isn’t theirs to give. It’s ours. It’s on us. We aren’t going anywhere. We just got here.” But where are we; and how are we going to think, elaborate, and decorate this place? It is no surprise that the spaces currently occupied are parks. Park space in particular already ornaments, articulates the interfaces of our human affects with countless non-human ecologies. This is not a matter of aesthetic surplus. How we decorate a new kind of a public space will matter; it will determine the variability of its surfaces. As we continue to witness capitalism collapse in on itself it will become more and more urgent to elaborate parkspace, even in small hasty bursts; to decorate the spaces we already occupy as parks with/as the ornaments that will articulate the spaces of a new democracy. But how to decorate the new park? How does poetry occupy such a park? For example, is there room for the intimacy of the coterie in the new park, or must the ‘public’ projects of Duncan and Olson dominate?Whiskey & Fox asks for paragraph-long essays, poems, images, et alia, to publish in a special series which will return to our short format issues (roughly 6 pages an issue). For this series the ‘Fox again requests hasty writing and will proceed with hasty publication of very brief issues to facilitate hard copy distribution. The libraries accumulating at the public occupations are of increasing importance and in need of, among other contributions, those pertinent to issues of the queer sexual politics which inhere in Whiskey & Fox’s function as a journal of poetry, theory, and queer-heterotopoi.Whiskey & Fox asks you to ‘language Language for democratic dwelling,’ Make haste! Decorate the new democracy. Send contributions to parksandoccupation [at] whiskeyandfox [dot] org.

The fox “raids the chicken ‘coup’ and snacks on the state.”

Posted by
Whiskey & Fox

2/27/11

Friends of the fox the BABEL Working group has announced the full unveiling within the next few weeks of a new books series to be called "Punctum Books" So far, their blog announces what promises to be an exciting press, in tune with the devices both of the Whiskey and of the Fox:

The BABEL Working Group is excited to announce the launching of Punctum Books, a new open-access and print-on-demand book series, directed by Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College, CUNY), that aims to promote radically creative modes of writing and inquiry across a whimsical para-humanities-assemblage. Spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion are encouraged. Vision statement, editorial board, forthcoming titles, and website currently under construction. Stay tuned.

On the In The Middle medieval studies group blog, Eileen Joy announces that a full vision statement, editorial board, and first forthcoming titles will be announced in the next 2-3 weeks. Keep watch for PUNCTUM.

Posted by
Whiskey & Fox

2/22/11

The next Whiskey & Fox is actually coming together presently, although it will again have been at the one-a-year schedule that this next issue will come out. But we're promising some great stuff. This time around again a funky editors' preface, an afterwords by Medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (whose current project is on the sex life of stones), a host of poems from a host of poets seen and not seen before in the likes of this journal, a score for music--as in yes, a poetry journal publishing a musical score, a nice essay, some lovely images, and possibly a neat surprise from the American Natural History Museum of New York City. The issue will be lithic. The journal will take its stand too with the lithic. Will like and lick the lithic. After all, it is the lithic which will teach us how to, in swaying, to hold sway and see the wall of the city Charles Olson proposes is built out of sound to arise from nothing more than a short cliff, a little ledge of rock. The poesis of heterotopic architecture in earthscience, geology, seismology, petrology, crystallography, lithography.

Keep a close watch here and we'll update you as to when the Whiskey wakes and the Fox pours out again--very, very soon. So, to offer that little review, or raid...

On 'Pipe Dope' by Jon Witmer, at the Danger DigestA report from the woods near the lair of the fox, regarding one of our past, early, and future contributors (although you will have to wait for the issue after this one mentioned above for his next offering): Jon Witmer--whose Comics blog over at Danger Digest has been great for a while--is drawing and writing a really stunning one-panel-every-weekday comic for the duration of a year. The thing is called Pipe Dope: Mostly True Stories About: David J. Witmer, General T. Dog, and many, many more. It's still only just started, so there's plenty of time to catch up and start keeping up. Its already really elegant. One is easily taken in especially by the textures insinuated by the simple edges of surfaces, which otherwise, indicated only by a bit of a black fill or a white zap-line (as in the shine of hair) might appear only flat. Witmer is giving us a tactilely fully textured world whose being is ready for the kind of nuanced sensory encounter that will multiply our pleasures, which, within the eddies of time pulled around by this variability of surface in each single panel, offer affectively substantial sites of texture to help elaborate our world heterotopically, radically, even perhaps--in those odd twists of black suggesting a comic character's hair-wisp--against the overly detexturizing and time-homogenizing operations of capital and the anthropo-hetero-normative logics of its erotics and its states. And after all, as the back of our very first issue suggested, as it appeared intentionally, not as a typo and with puns fully intended, "the fox raids the chicken coup and snacks on the state." Go read it at the Danger Digest.

...to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them.